Freelance film reviewers Frank Gabrenya, Melissa Starker and Peter Tonguette each submitted a
list of the top films of the year.

These 10 movies, listed alphabetically, represent their consensus. The descriptions are taken
from reviews that ran in
The Dispatch or comments supplied later by reviewers:

American Hustle: David O. Russell’s dizzying, outlandishly entertaining film —
starring Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper — is a 21st century
screwball farce about 20th-century con men, scam artists and those who dream of living large, a
film that is bighearted and off the wall in equal measure.

Before Midnight: Richard Linklater’s most recent visit with the characters from
Before Sunrise and
Before Sunset reunites viewers with two old friends (Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy) as it
insightfully reveals the joys and stresses of long-term love.

Blue Jasmine: After the thousands of dead-on jokes he has delivered through 50
years, the strongest legacy of filmmaker Woody Allen might be the gallery of complicated female
characters he has created. The latest and one of the most absorbing is Jasmine (Cate Blanchett), a
former woman of privilege brought low by betrayal and struggling to remake her shattered life with
the aid of a little luck and a lot of alcohol.

Captain Phillips: One of the most impressive feats in filmmaking is to turn a real
event whose outcome is widely known into an arresting thriller. Director Paul Greengrass
accomplishes it with his nerve-rattling drama, starring Tom Hanks, about a 2009 standoff involving
Somali pirates and an American cargo ship.

Dallas Buyers Club: Matthew McConaughey gold-plates his status as a top-tier actor
in the fact-based drama set during the early terror of the AIDS epidemic. He plays Ron Woodroof, a
strutting Texas hell-raiser who rides bulls, beds women, snorts cocaine and starts a fight at the
drop of an insult. For color, the raging homophobe has a worldview narrower than his beat-up
trailer.

Frances Ha: Effortless and effervescent, this small miracle of a movie, directed
by Noah Baumbach, is honest and funny with an aim that is true. It’s a timeless story of the joys
and sorrows of youth and a dead-on portrait of how things are for one particular New York woman
(Greta Gerwig) who, try as she might, can’t quite get her life together.

Gravity: The first feature by director Alfonso Cuaron since the excellent
Children of Men in 2006 combines a stripped-down narrative, expressive performances by
Sandra Bullock and George Clooney and a dazzling combination of visual and aural effects to produce
an immersive experience of terror and determination in space.

Inside Llewyn Davis: Set in the early 1960s in the folk scene of New York, the
latest from the Coen brothers features a star-making performance from Oscar Isaac in the title
role, along with the year’s best use of a cat in a supporting role, and scenes and imagery that are
as hard to shake as the songs in its catchy score.

12 Years a Slave: Director Steve McQueen and screenwriter John Ridley adapt a true
story of capture, torment and freedom in the age of American slavery into the searing and
horror-filled tale of Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor).

The Wolf of Wall Street: Martin Scorsese, the country’s greatest living filmmaker,
is back in top form with a truth-based story of Wall Street excess that’s alternately exhilarating,
hilarious and horrifying. Leonardo DiCaprio, P.J. Byrne and Jon Favreau star.